The major thing that springs to mind here is I've never seen a compelling reason to believe that …

Oh yeah, this one really is fun. We used to joke that the CTO of one of the companies I worked for made a killing as his second job was for our competitors. Turns out the dude has been doing that for about 15 years between various places and now is about to retire, blameless in the eyes of everyone who doesn't understand what happened.

Refer to the section “(11)(b) Managers and Supervisors” https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...

> I've never seen a compelling reason to believe that the original CIA suggestions actually worked. Let’s set asside the fact that the document wasn’t written by the CIA. The purported goal of this document was to provide practicaly applicable advice to the regular citizen who found themselves under enemy occupation. Most concretely to be given to the French people who did not like the German occupation. You are talking about the strategy “working” or “not working” as if these are binary things. The goal here was not that these simple steps will bring Germany to their knees but to increase the cost of the occupation. To cause enough deniable friction which bogs down the resources and make everything just a bit more inefficient. > In my experience workers like that exist naturally They do. And that is the point. That is what makes these strategies deniable. > and organisations are great a…

You can do far far worse than naive optimizing for profit. Optimizing for *REPORTED* profit. People learn very quickly to manipulate the reporting, modeling, and accounting. Just less than two decades ago we had the entire financial system lending massive amounts of money to the worst possible borrowers and REPORTING massive profits.

> [1] Yes, the irony here is that naive optimising for profit is typically not profitable. Yes but only over a relatively long time period, which the overarching system itself is not incentivizing anyone to look at too carefully.

They do work, we had a director who did all that in a previous company (probably unintentionally), and things ground to a halt and productivity fell to zero.

> naive optimising for profit is typically not profitable Naive optimizing for anything, while consuming that metric as fuel, has that effect. A.k.a. “We will continue having meetings until we figure out why productivity is dropping”.